Poem fractal

Sweet, if you like and love me still

by Francis Davison

c. 1575 to c. 1619 (~44)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The bee and spider, by a diverse power, Suck honey and poison from the selfsame flower.”

Observing how the same source can yield opposite results depending on the nature of the one who draws from it · Epigraph, A Poetical Rapsody (1611)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Stéphane Mallarmé · 0.5480 − 0.1355i · 0.056 away · Compare side by side
  2. D. H. Lawrence · 0.6087 − 0.2290i · 0.062 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · 0.5225 − 0.1645i · 0.070 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Cunninghame-Graham · 0.5328 − 0.2066i · 0.071 away · Compare side by side
  5. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · 0.6098 − 0.2558i · 0.089 away · Compare side by side
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